Rambus to start selling DDR4 chipsets for server market

Rambus announced it's jumping into memory module production. Traditionally, the company focused on designing and licensing memory technology but now Rambus will be selling DDR4 chipsets for the server market. The Rambus RB26 chipset is part of a new family called R+, it's designed for high-capacity server systems and decouples the memory chips from the controller to alleviate issues with memory density limitations.

The Rambus RB26 chips will be included on the memory modules themselves, but this chipset a well as the actual memory chips will be manufactured by the usual DRAM makers like Hynix, Samsung and Micron.

In systems with large amounts of DDR4 memory, the electrical load that the memory chips themselves place on the processor's integrated memory controller limits the amount of memory that can be installed and the speed the memory can run at.

Rambus' controllers decouple the memory chips from the controller. These enable the use of Registered DIMMs and Load Reduced DIMMs. Registered DIMMs place a buffer between the memory controller and the address lines of the processor used to select which memory to read. Load Reduced DIMMs go further and include buffers in the data lines too. These buffers also allow multiple memory chips to be stacked on the same data lines, further increasing memory densities.

Rambus plans to expand on this new strategy by offering more DRAM chipsets, focusing on higher performance and lower power consumption. By making the chipsets itself, Rambus may find it easier to get companies to buy into its technology.